Journalism Fundamentals

This week in our journalism lecture we looked at some writing fundamentals. Marie talked about information attribution and the dangers using anonymous sources and discussed the nuts and bolts things such as spelling, punctuation and grammar. 

In their book 'Blur: How To Know What's True In The Age Of Information Overload',  authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenthiel tell a wonderful story about a journalist named Homer Bigart. During military press briefings in Vietnam, Bigart would ask countless seemingly dumb questions before going out with military units into the field. Other less experienced journalists would return to Saigon and file stories recounting the official version of the events, but Bigart's stories were different. The answers to his seemingly dumb questions, now on record, along with his own eyewitness accounts enabled him to refute the official line on how the war was progressing. The book quotes Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam who described Bigart's style as "portable ignorance" and William Prochnau, who said of Bigart, "He shows up knowing little and then finds out everything".

In their book "All The President's Men", Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward detail the tremendous difficulties they had using anonymous sources in their investigation of the Watergate Scandal. Unless two independent sources confirmed their information, they wouldn't use the material.

We also looked at a video called Caine's Arcade and had to write a story using the inverted pyramid style, where all the pertinent information of who, what, when, where, why and how is contained in the first few lines. After 17 years as a paramedic, figuring out what to write in a short report isn't usually too much of a drama, however in our tutorial, we had to interview a classmate and write a 500 word article based on that interview. What I've discovered is that knowing what to ask in an interview when you don't have time to prepare is difficult.  In the ambulance service I had a safety net, we ask standard questions for each type of case. If you attend a patient who's had a fit, then you'd want to ask how long the fit went for, what it looked like, what happened before, what happened afterwards. Someone who's had a fall gets questioned about being knocked out, do they have dizziness or neck pain? For a patient with chest pain, you'd ask a different set of questions. What I'm finding now is that I often don't have a clue what to ask someone now it's not ambulance related. Until I gain some experience, maybe I can specialise and be an on-scene car crash reporter?